Ghosts don’t scare me as much as a car park ticket!

I saw a ghost but it didn’t frighten me. However, there’s a car park ticket that’s scaring the hell out of me. On a late Somerset Summer’s evening in 1977, my friend Bruce Wallace and I were stumbling from the village pub, heading back to the farm where I’d spent blissful holidays ever since I was a toddler.

Towering hedgerows are a feature of England’s Arcadian south-west, so the narrow lane was shaded dark as dusk. Before the road curved toward the farmyard, there was a gap in the hedge, looking across to the river and the little stone bridge.

Naturally, as the fading sunlight suddenly hit us, we both turned our heads toward it, where we saw a tall uniformed man, standing by the bridge.

As the hedgerows returned, we lost sight of the man, who was gone before we crossed the bridge ourselves.

It was an entirely unremarkable encounter. Doubtless the farmer and his wife had taken in more guests. The farm was listed in several guide books, so later, when the new arrival failed to turn up for dinner, I asked the farmer who he was.

He turned his tanned creased handsome face to me.

“By the bridge was he?”

“Yes, in some kind of army uniform.”

“Ah, that’d be my granddad. He likes to stand by the bridge.”

“No, couldn’t be him. This bloke was youngish, in his 20s I’d say.”

Flicking his pitch black fringe out of his eyes, his deep Somerset accent betrayed nothing but nonchalance.

“Arr, that’d be him. Went off to the Somme. Tends to pop up around this time of year. Always loved standing by that bridge. More spuds?”

Hunching our shoulders, staring wide-eyed across the table, Bruce and I made stupid faces and went “Bleeeeeaaaayyyyaaarrr!” at each other, allowing comical shivers to run through our bodies.

Over the years I’d seen and heard so many magical things in that farmhouse that I knew better than to question this. My father was no small man, yet I’d seen the farmer levitate him high up from the floor, using just his little fingers.

The house itself was listed as haunted, but while I never saw the official ghost, I became relaxed around the atmosphere that prevailed in their home: all things were possible.

One morning at breakfast the farmer’s wife was talking about the dream she’d had the night before, in which she and her family were sitting in the guest dining room, eating their dinner in front of a huge fireplace.

The family kitchen had just such a fireplace, with a massive and ancient oak beam running above the cavernous grate and many little nooks, baker’s ovens, and cubby holes in which to dry herbs.

Without uttering a word, the farmer finished his breakfast, left to return with an axe, which he proceeded to pound into the wall of the guest dining room.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.